Doctoral Dissertation Research: Using language documentation and experimental methods to investigate differential case marking in Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language

语言学研究人类语言的结构如何帮助人们进行交流。在描述事件时，发言者可能希望简单地表达“谁对谁做了什么。“描述事件的第二个目标是说话者如何将听众的注意力引导到新的或意想不到的信息上。在众所周知的语言中，这两个目标与不同的语言手段相关联，例如句子结构（“句法”），单词的组成部分（“形态”）以及短语和句子的发音方面（“韵律”）。例如，英语使用代词的主语和宾语格形式作为第一个目标，使用韵律或语调作为第二个目标。然而，许多其他语言并不一致地标记主语和/或宾语。此外，他们经常使用一个标记来识别一个动作的执行者，以突出一个意想不到的特定参与者。该项目将回答有关这些语言的使用者如何沟通谁负责一个动作，以及他们如何通过其他手段（如语调）解决潜在的含义模糊的问题。该项目将为人类如何使用语言进行交流提供新的见解，并对更好地整合语言结构的不同组成部分（如语法和形态与韵律）的交流模型具有更广泛的影响。这些文档将构成CoPI撰写的博士论文中分析的核心材料。更广泛的影响包括在太平洋和区域濒危文化数字资源档案馆公开提供录音、转录和丰富的元数据的存款（PARADISEC），以及社区成员，包括致力于语言发展和文化保护的地方组织对这一材料的使用。在这个项目中，CoPI，俄勒冈州大学的一名博士生将记录和分析苏密语，一种来自藏缅语系的印度东北部语言。Sumi有一个有趣的系统，称为差异论元标记，在这个系统中，及物或不及物句子的主语并不总是被标记为格，而是取决于其他语义因素，如主语的生命性和确定性，句子的时态以及句子是肯定的还是否定的。这项研究将使用新的定量语料库方法与传统的语言学田野调查方法相结合，包括记录和分析自然主义文本，以确定这些因素中哪些是相关的。此外，虽然语言学研究倾向于将形态和句法的研究与语调的研究分开，但韵律研究中使用的实验方法将被用来证明韵律分析如何融入形态句法的研究，以及两者结合可以得到什么。录制的视频和音频数据还将有助于对语言进行更广泛的语法描述，这对未来的语言发展是必要的。该项目还得到了阿萨姆邦印度理工学院古瓦哈蒂成员的支持，这是俄勒冈州大学语言学系与印度东北部语言学家和机构之间持续不断的合作的一部分。

Linguistics studies how the structure of human language helps people to communicate. When describing events, speakers may wish to simply convey "who did what to whom." A second goal in describing events is in how speakers may want to direct a listener's attention to information that is new or unexpected. In well-known languages, these two goals are associated with different sets of linguistic device, such as sentence structures ('syntax'), components of words ('morphology'), and aspects of the pronunciation of phrases and sentences ('prosody'). For example, English uses subject and object case forms of pronouns for the first goal, and prosody, or intonation, for the second. However, many other languages do not consistently mark subjects and/or objects. Furthermore, they often use a marker that identifies the doer of an action to also highlight a particular participant that is unexpected. This project will answer questions about how speakers of such languages communicate who is responsible for an action, and how they resolve potential ambiguity in meaning through other means such as intonation. This project will provide new insights into how humans use language for communication, and has broader implications for models of communication that better integrate different components of linguistic structure, such as syntax and morphology with prosody. The documentation will form the core material analyzed in a doctoral dissertation produced by the CoPI. Broader impacts include a publicly available deposit of the recordings, transcriptions, and rich metadata at the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), based in Australia, and the uses of this material by members of the community, including local organizations dedicated to language development and cultural preservation.In this project, the CoPI, a doctoral student at the University of Oregon will be documenting and analyzing Sumi, a language of Northeast India from the Tibeto-Burman language family. Sumi has an interesting system known as differential argument marking where the subject of a transitive or intransitive sentence is not consistently marked for case, but depends also on other semantic factors, such as the animacy and definiteness of the subject, the tense of the sentence and whether the sentence is affirmative or negative. The study will use a combination of new quantitative corpus methods with traditional linguistic fieldwork methods, including the recording and analysis of naturalistic texts, to identify which of these factors are relevant. In addition, although linguistic research has tended to separate the study of morphology and syntax from that of intonation, experimental methods used in prosodic research will be used to demonstrate how prosodic analysis can be integrated into the study of morphosyntax, and what can be gained from a combination of both. The recorded video and audio data will also contribute to a larger grammatical description of the language, which is necessary for future language development. The project is also supported by members of the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in Assam, as part of an ongoing and growing collaboration between the Linguistics Department at the University of Oregon and linguists and institutions in Northeast India.